February by Jim Harrison

February

Warm enough here in Patagonia AZ to read

the new Mandelstam outside in my underpants

which is to say he was never warm enough

except in summer and he was without paper to write

and his belly was mostly empty most of the time

like that Mexican girl I picked up on a mountain road

the other day who couldn’t stop weeping. She had slept

out two nights in a sweater in below-freezing weather.

She had been headed to Los Angeles but the coyote

took her money and abandoned her in the wilderness.

Her shoes were in pieces and her feet bleeding.

I took her to town and bought her food. She got a ride

to Nogales. She told us in Spanish that she just wanted

to go home and sleep in her own bed. That’s what Mandelstam

wanted with mother in the kitchen fixing dinner. Everyone

wants this. Mandelstam said, “To be alone is to be alive.”

“Lost and looked in the sky’s asylum eye.” “What of

her nights?” Maybe she was watched by some of the fifty

or so birds I have in the yard now. When they want to

they just fly away. I gave them my yard and lots of food.

They smile strange bird smiles. She couldn’t fly away.

Neither can I though I’ve tried a lot lately to migrate

to the Camargue on my own wings. When they are married,

Mandelstam and the Mexican girl, in heaven they’ll tell

long stories of the horrors of life on earth ending each session

by chanting his beautiful poems that we did not deserve.